Gravers, yes. I’ve spoken a bit about the Graves Family Dynasty, the ruling institution, but I haven’t spoken much about the Gravers themselves. What were they? They were an institution V&G created, their soldiers. I mentioned before that Victor was a Genghis Khan, but he was not a military man. Conquest in the 21st century isn’t just about violence (not that there isn’t widespread violence in our time), it’s about affecting change. It’s still about obtaining power, but what is power, truly?
It’s simply a means of expressing one’s will, namely by getting other people to do your will for you. This can be done through violence or laws or with money, as we’ve mentioned, but it can also be done through voluntary exchange. A president is powerful, a CEO is powerful, but a community leader is also powerful. A wise man is also powerful. If you have good ones, your parents and family and friends might have a powerful influence on you. And all power is simply influence. It doesn’t have to be bad (although we will still be going back and forth between the utopic and the dystopic, have no fear. The first thing something must be is interesting).
In the beginning, the Gravers were simply a weaponized fan base, used as a blunt tool to set up a quick and dirty distribution network, but they grew into more than that over the course of Victor and Gloriana’s lives. The pair had planned all of this out in their childhood. They had seen the power of community spirit in action. They had read their histories.
If I describe here what the Graver institution was at the time of V&G’s death, contrasting it with the humble beginnings I have just described in the previous chapter, you might lose your suspension of disbelief. There were great changes, but it was all very gradual. All a trickling effect.
One of the things that’s said about the world of today is that it lacks a sense of community. As church membership dwindles, as the town square is largely forgotten, as people live more insular lives, as they work from home, socialization is something that isn’t happening very well. It happens, to be sure, but not like it was. Back during the middle ages, one might be born into a community and know, growing up, that they’d be dealing with the same people for the rest of their lives. These people would also be their only real source of entertainment, of commiseration, of pride. This is missing from today, and Victor and Gloriana Graves knew that.
The Gravers were set up to be a social club, the likes of which the world had never seen, one that was only possible with today’s technology. History abhors a vacuum, after all, and this lack of community and purpose is prime real estate for a charismatic figure, regardless of whether they’re great and good or great and terrible, or some combination of the two. But let me reiterate that it was the technology. Do you know about the printing press? How it shaped the world around it? Google that if you don’t. It took some time from the time the printing press was invented to when it actually changed things, though. These things take time. The internet has become like the printing press. It has changed things. It will continue to change things.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Victor and Gloriana Graves, being agents of change, knew that the internet was their primary tool, more so than anything else. Khan’s army had horse archery that allowed it to conquer the world; the Graves’ army would have the internet. And, like the gladius was so iconic a tool in the Roman world of Caesar, so too would the smartphone become the ubiquitous tool of the 21st century. If the symbol of the fantasy genre is a sword, then the symbol of the Gravesverse genre is a phone.
It was time to develop the app. Sometimes in my imaginings, this comes before the first rallying cry to the Gravers, sometimes after. It doesn’t really matter here which came first, just that it was created around the time Victor and Gloriana Graves began their work in earnest. It connected them to each other and organized them into units, based around their local movie theater. It also assigned them to one of three teams or factions or whatever the best word for it is.
There were Orange Gravers, Purple Gravers, and Green Gravers. Pumpkins, Vampires, and Goblins (to lessen the impact of the whole death-obsession thing, there is a strong Halloween theme associated with the Graver aesthetic. I might have failed to mention that when I first brought up Minecraft).
In some cases, the teams split up the movie theater unit, in other cases, the entire movie theater unit belonged to one team. This type of thing is a recurring motif in Graves philosophy, the idea of experimentation. Which of these two methods would lead to the greatest outcome? Victor and Gloriana didn’t know, so they’d try both methods and see which one was better. Better at what, though? Being a Graver itself meant fostering a sense of national community, whereas being a part of a movie theater unit meant to foster a sense of local community. The teams were a midpoint between the two. They were meant to be something like sports teams, except not geographically determined. Institutions within institutions. “Plans within plans.” V&G planned to foster a friendly competitive spirit between the teams themselves.
And so now they needed uniforms, a sense of identity. Yes, Graver Nation is set up to be an identity group. Victor and Gloriana Graves were not immune from being affected by the political happenings of the mid to late 2010s and early 2020s. I haven’t spoken much about this yet, but V&G existed in a copy of the world we ourselves live in, with all its people and problems (although I have changed a few things around).
There’s another thousand.
